1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to management of information and, more particularly, to management of data among distributed computer systems.
2. Related Art
Management applications for network, software and/or systems management have become commonplace. Management applications are generally software applications that are executed on standalone computer systems. These management systems provide information regarding one or more entities, such as computers and network communication devices. In particular, these systems gather information from the entities and present them to a network administrator for analysis and interpretation. The network administrator in turn provides corrective actions, configuration changes, and the like to maintain and/or improve network and systems performance. One example of a network management system is SPECTRUM network management system available from Aprisma Management Technologies, Inc. The WinWatch management application available from Metrix, S.A., is an example of a system that provides management for end-user computer systems and servers. Systems Management Server (SMS) available from the Microsoft Corporation provides similar information for managing software and systems.
A recent trend is to manage higher-level entities such as business processes and applications, whereby minimum service levels to users may be maintained. For example, a business process may depend on the performance of one or more other entities, such as another process, a networking device, computer system or other entity that affects the business process. Similarly, an application may be managed wherein the state of the application depends on the status of various software processes, hardware devices, and communications between them. Due to the need for managing business processes and applications, new software applications have been designed to manage them. For example, the NERVECENTER management system available from Seagate, Inc. is an example of a business process management system. The PATROL management application available from BMC Software provides application management functions. Other management systems are available.
Drawbacks of the aforementioned management systems exist. For example, most network management systems need large amounts of storage space on a standalone system. Although the network management system (NMS) may be capable of storing large amounts of data, some data needs to be deleted after reaching a finite level of the standalone system. Thus, long-term data storage is not available, and therefore features which require long-term storage, such as long-term trend analysis, is not possible on these standalone systems.
Also, many different management systems are needed to perform different management tasks. For example, separate systems are generally required for systems and network management. These systems generally collect different types of data, and do not share data between the systems. Also, these separate systems are limited by the types of information that they collect. For example, a network management system generally cannot determine chargebacks to a user based on performance data of a computer system such as a file server.
Data warehouses are a known solution for storing large amounts of data. Data warehouses are generally accessed directly by consumers of its data, and the data is generally loaded manually by database entry personnel. A data warehouse generally refers to an extract of operational data for the purposes of efficient query-only processing. For example, data warehouses are used for storing business-related data such as financial or production information, wherein use of the warehouse facilitates improved decision making. A data warehouse typically contains a wide variety of data that presents a coherent picture of business conditions at a single point in time, and this picture is used for decision support. One such data warehouse product is the ORACLE WAREHOUSE software system available from the Oracle Corporation.
Similar to a data warehouse, a data mart helps one make informed business decisions. Data marts typically contain highly-focused data specific to a department or individual line of business, such as sales, marketing, or finance. Since data marts databases tend to be smaller than that of a data warehouse (data marts are typically under 100 GB in size), data marts are easier to manage and implement.
According to the present invention, a system is provided for managing information comprising a data manager that accepts data from a plurality of management systems and processes and stores that data in a data warehouse. The data manager comprises an agent configured to accept information from the plurality of systems and which maps the accepted information into database fields of the data warehouse and a database accessor that stores the accepted information in the data warehouse.
In accordance with one embodiment, the agent deletes duplicate data received from more than one source. Also, at least one of the plurality of management systems is a network management system. In one embodiment, the database accessor utilizes a standard database interface to one or more proprietary data warehouses. In another aspect, the agent is a push agent configured to push data to the database accessor at a specified interval. In another aspect, the agent is a pulling agent configured to pull one or more systems for obtaining management data and provides the management data to the database accessor. In another aspect, the one or more systems are network management systems. In yet another aspect, the network management systems store different types of management information in network management databases.
In one aspect, the system can determine and control how much information is to be stored in a local database. A filtering and scheduling interface allows users to decide what types of information they wish to replicate to the data warehouse and how often. In one embodiment, a standard database interface is provided to maintain independence from the underlying proprietary database. In one aspect, the database interface is a CORBA interface. In another embodiment of the invention, the data warehouse stores object-oriented objects.
In another aspect, system is provided for management of network data. Network data is aggregated from multiple data sources into the data warehouse, wherein the data can be provided to software applications. The system integrates disparate data sources into the data warehouse by for example, performing data filtering, collation, compression, and mapping the data into database fields of the data warehouse.
Advantageously, this system provides consolidated information to applications that can perform high-level analysis. Because information is stored in the data warehouse and a standard interface is provided to access the warehouse, a consistent, reusable set of services for obtaining management data is available. In one aspect, the system is capable of tracking trends and changes in network devices and software models of the devices. For example, a network accounting application can integrate usage data from different network managers and devices and network probe information, allowing a user to see a consolidated graph or billing statement. In one embodiment, the system can trend business processes, showing over time which processes have failed most often and what components have caused those failures. Further, in yet another embodiment, the system can determine chargebacks for users consuming network resources, such as bandwidth.
Further features and advantages of the present invention as well as the structure and operation of various embodiments of the present invention are described in detail below with reference to the accompanying drawings. In the drawings, like reference numerals indicate identical or functionally similar elements. Additionally, the left-most one or two digits of a reference numeral identifies the drawing in which the reference numeral first appears.